The heads-up display winked on: a ghostly set of gauges superimposed on black space beyond. To the left of it, Earth made a curving blue-and-white wall. I was used to the sight after a year of living in orbit, but 1 still gave it a glance. It might be a while before I saw it again.
After a moment I looked at the gauges for anomalies, but everything looked go. “Tilbey, are you ready?” I asked.
“Ready,” he replied, his voice just as Norwegian as mine. “Mars first?”
“OK. Command, set heading for Mars, direct route, no correction for gravitation.” I got to give the orders, since the control system was my baby. The mass-eliminator was Tilbey’s responsibility.
“Warning,” the computer replied. “Direct course intersects geosynchronous satellite orbit. Emergency authorization required for transit.”
“Oh, hell. All right, take us around geosynch, then give us the most direct allowed route.”
Nothing happened.
Tilbey laughed. “You forgot to say, ‘Simon says!’ ”
“Go screw yourself,” I told him. “Command, take us around geosynch, then give us the most direct allowed route to Mars. Command, use one-half gravity acceleration. Command, execute.”
The ship spun around fast enough to be disorienting. We’d Tilbey-ized the mass out of practically everything but the fuel, so the ship was light. Even the smallest of the attitude jets really kicked it around. I hoped that the main engine could throttle down low enough to give us just half a g\ if not, we might get a sudden surprise.
When the nose of the ship pointed away from Earth, the computer started the fusion drive. Even though we’d done countless tests and calculations on the strength of the holding field required, 1 still half expected to fall through the deck, but the field held. I looked at the aft view in the heads-up display and saw Earth begin to slide away behind us.
“Command, increase thrust to one g,” I said. 1 hardly felt any change, but the Earth dwindled a bit faster now.
“Are you hanging on OK?” I asked Tilbey.
“Fine. Go ahead and run it on up a few more gs.”
So I gave the computer the commands, one g at a time, until we were accelerating toward Mars at thirty gs. I felt a bit of vibration, but no discomfort, and the holding field had no trouble keeping me in place.
Earth was about half-sized behind us by then and the Moon was just a small bright dot beside it, only fifteen minutes into the flight. I checked our velocity: 304,000 miles per hour. If we shut the drive down now we could coast to Mars in a week, which was about as good as the hottest courier ships could do it and they boosted all the way.
We didn’t stop. We didn’t even hold at thirty gs. After a couple of minutes to make sure nothing would shake loose, we ran it up to thirty-five, then forty, then finally all the way to fifty. That was full power from the engines, but they were tuned to run at full for weeks, so at that thrust everything settled down and the ship seemed steady as a rock.
Five hours later we flashed past Mars like a bullet past an apple. We got practically no gravity assist at that speed, but it hardly mattered; by then we were doing nearly 2 percent the speed of light and still gaining. Not much on the interstellar scale, but plenty fast to cruise through the Solar System. In fact we had already broken the speed record for a manned vehicle. I radioed that news back to Earth, then ordered the computer to loop us around toward Saturn, which, since Jupiter was on the other side of the Sun, was the next closest planet. Just to be safe we took the ship up above the plane of the ecliptic and skirted the asteroid belt, then dropped back down to roar past at 8 percent of light-speed.
That took another fifteen hours, after which we turned around and slowed down so we wouldn’t shoot on out into interstellar space. We didn’t want to do that yet, not until we could pick up Liam and load the ship with spare parts. And load the computer with a pocket World Library to help keep us sane throughout the long interstellar voyage. Even at fifty gs acceleration and accounting for time dilation, once we approached light-speed it would take us months of subjective time to get to Alpha Centauri. The Galaxy is a big place.
The Solar System isn’t all that small either. It took us just as long to get back as it did to reach Saturn, blasting away at fifty gs the whole distance. We beamed a news release home ahead of us to announce our great success, and prepared to face a gaggle of reporters when we got home.
So we were completely taken by surprise when we pulled into our old parking orbit next to Freeport and were met by a single UN peacekeeping ship. And when its captain, a French woman named Cluny, told us to stand down for boarding, we grew even more befuddled.
“What, did we break the speed limit or something?” Tilbey asked her.
She didn’t laugh. “You are charged with conspiracy to commit murder, and your ship is being impounded as evidence.”
“Murder?” I asked. “What are you talking about?” Then I realized what it had to be. “Wait a minute. Is this about Liam? Is he all right?”
“He is alive, yes,” she said. “No thanks to you. You’ll be read a list of charges at your arraignment. Now surrender your ship and come across to ours or we’ll be forced to remove you from it by force.”
1 would have liked to see her try that, but I learned when I was a kid not to harass the cops. Save your protest for the people who actually decided your fate: the lawyers and the judge.
We did do one thing in preparation for our trip through the legal system: before the cops boarded us Tilbey said, “Command, adjust coupling constant to 20 percent. Command, lock controls to my voice or Danbury’s voice only.”
The coupling constant determined the strength of our interface with normal matter. I felt myself grow less substantial as the computer complied with Tilbey’s order; I was able to swing my arm through the support beams around my body cage without hindrance, and my vision grew less distinct as my eyes intercepted less light. We had determined through experimentation that 20 percent was the lower limit of usefulness. It was even lower than what we’d used to fly with. Much below that and we could barely interact with the “real world” at all. But unless the cops had a magnetic confinement cell already set up for us, we could walk right out of any place they tried to lock us into.
I wondered how long Tilbey’s precautions would keep the cops out of our computer. Long enough, I hoped, to straighten things out with the law and get Liam installed aboard the Spook so we could get on with our trip to Alpha Centauri, but I wasn’t making any bets.
When the UN forces arrived, we were as cooperative as we could be without turning up the coupling constant. That was a considerable relief to them, I’m sure, because handcuffs slipped right through our wrists unless we held completely still, and we couldn’t ride the shuttle back to the station because we fell right through it the moment the pilot fired the thrusters. So we wound up swimming across to the Freeport and joining our would-be jailers in the hub, where we were led to a holding cell that wouldn’t have held us for ten seconds if we wanted to leave. But we behaved; we wanted to get to the bottom of this with as little fuss as possible.